


Unlooked For

by icarus_chained



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Confrontations, Family Feels, Forgiveness, Gen, Hatred, Kindness, Letters, Mercy - Freeform, Mild Language, Post-Dishonored (Video Game), Post-Low Chaos Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-10-01 22:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20418701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: Before the Whalers leave Dunwall, the Lord Protector arrives to deliver a letter from a ten-year-old Empress Emily Kaldwin. She wants some words with Daud, at least written ones. They're not exactly what he might have expected.





	Unlooked For

**Author's Note:**

> My sister and I are slowly making our way through the game. This is possibly a bit AU, depending on events in the second one. Apologies for that. I just wanted child!Emily to write an angry sort-of-thank-you to Daud, which he did NOT want. Also Corvo being gaunt and grim and having really lowered standards for people not being horrible to him.

The Lord Protector came for him a second time at twilight.

Daud didn’t see him coming. None of them did. Not a single one of his Whalers laid eyes on the man before he chose to reveal himself. Even less than last time. He’d had at least some warning then. Not now. Not this time. 

There was a sound, first. Nothing more than that. A whisper of displaced air, the sound of a traversal. And then there was a _presence_. The sensation of the man as he landed in Daud’s office, the atavistic instinct he called up in those around him. A sudden primal, animal fear, a cold fist clutching in the gut. Something landed behind Daud, landed in the middle of his territory and his space, and every nerve in his body told him that something was death.

He turned, slowly. Straightened, the dread crawling along his spine, and turned around. And there he was. The Masked Felon, the Lord Protector. Standing slowly from his stoop, the instinctive crouch of a potential combat landing. Just standing there, lean and staring. That _void-awful_ mask on his face. It was a hideous fucking thing. Metallic and ghastly. Daud faced it down without a flinch.

He’d had nightmares like this, he thought idly. A hundred times, probably. Even after the event itself. Maybe _more so_ after the event itself. That meeting had made no sense. Not a lick, from start to finish. This … this made more. Nightmarish as it was. It made more sense.

“… Bodyguard,” he rasped. Mildly pleased at how steady and casual it came out. “Wasn’t expecting you, after the last visit. Had a change of heart?”

Or just a resurgence of common sense, more likely. Leaving an assassin alive behind him. The killer of an _Empress_. That had never made any sense. Even leaving aside finer feelings, the child Empress that not-so-secretly called him father, the gaping wound of love and rage and grief Daud had seen that day all those months ago when his sword pierced an Empress’ heart. Even without those. Leaving those aside. Common sense alone should have seen him dead.

Though he supposed a man who’d clawed his way out of Coldridge and not two days later thrown himself straight at _Holger Square_ instead … probably couldn’t claim all that much in the way of sense, common or otherwise.

He couldn’t help huffing faintly at the thought, a sort of giddy, black amusement, and the Lord Protector stirred himself finally in the face of it. His head moved, tilted like a bird as he studied Daud, and then …

He didn’t reach for a weapon. Daud’s body had tensed and braced without so much as a by-his-leave, entirely automatically, but the man didn’t reach for a sword. He reached for his mask, instead. Left-handed, the black-eyed bastard’s mark stark on the back of it, he reached up and pulled the thing away. Bared his face, still gaunt and haggard after almost a month, brown hair flopping raggedly across it, dark eyes sharp and … not wary. Not quite. Thoughtful, maybe.

It was worse than the mask, in all honesty. The mask was a nightmare, death made manifest. The face was a _man_, haggard and ruined, all by Daud’s hand. He’d take the metal any day. A thousand times over.

“… No,” the Protector –Attano—said, his voice a soft, crushed thing. Daud was almost too busy flinching at it to immediately take his meaning. Something flickered in the man’s face, a half-stifled flurry of expression, and he shook his head carefully at Daud. “No change. No killing.” A tiny, thoughtful pause. “Not on my end, anyway.”

It still wasn’t wary. He didn’t say it as a question, didn’t stand there as though he might be under threat. There was something, though. Some edge, something like challenge. A measured readiness. The man was strung like a wire these days. Still and thrumming and ready to unfurl. 

It was, and _fuck_ Daud anyway for thinking it, but it was a hell of a thing to look at.

Which was not the point. Which was not _any_ point. He cursed silently at himself, and fumbled a hand towards his cigarettes. Attano watched him. Attano didn’t flinch. Daud flicked a light and took a deep, steadying breath.

“None from me, either,” he managed finally. As if that had _ever_ been an option. As if that hadn’t been taken off the cards the moment her blood touched his hands. He shook his head, leaning a hip back against his desk to steady himself, keeping his hands deliberately calm, deliberately steady, around his cigarette. “Can’t speak for any other Crown forces, depending on their disposition, but you at least have free passage while we’re here.” A pause, while his lip curled wryly. “Not that you’d be impeded either way. But just so it’s said.”

He was inclined to reward a man for not killing them. He was inclined to encourage that restraint. Now, anyway. Now that he’d already lived the spectre of it, of a masked figure carving its way through his small kingdom and somehow, _somehow_, leaving his people untouched. It was a complete impossibility, but it had happened, and if he had any chance at all he was inclined to have it _keep_ happening. Free passage for all, and nobody dead. He’d take it. Any day.

Fuck, but he was a tired old man these days. 

Attano tilted his head again. That narrow, ready survey. Birdlike. His mother _had_ been on the nose when she’d named him, hadn’t she. Corvo fucking Attano. The blue crow of Dunwall. In another life, maybe. Here, now, it was still the Lord Protector that presided. Every lean, surgical line of him.

He reached into his breast pocket. Something inside that coat of his. Daud did _not_ tense. There was no fucking point in tensing anymore. Attano pulled something, a piece of paper, a _letter_, out of his coat. A proper letter, sealed in a fancy fucking envelope with gilt around the edges and thick red wax to seal it shut. The most official-looking bloody thing Daud had seen in his life. Attano weighed it for a moment, and then held it out towards Daud, a completely unfathomable expression on his face.

“It’s from Emily,” he said, and ignored the sudden squeak and grate of the desk as Daud’s hip barked against it. That thing in his eyes flickered again, that hint of an expression, but he didn’t flinch, and he didn’t falter. He held out the letter, steady as a rock. “She knows. As much as I could tell her. She wanted to talk to you. I promised I’d deliver it.” 

Daud stared at him. Wide-eyed, his cigarette dropping from numb fingers. He glanced down at the letter, his eyes skipping off it like it would somehow burn them, and then back at Attano. Who _still_ did not flinch. Who still didn’t back down. Something flickered behind him, shapes in the air as a pair of startled Whalers blinked into view and then back out again, traversals stuttering in their shock. If Daud had been able to, he’d have waved them off, waved them away in blind panic. Given how quickly they vanished again, he didn’t need to. 

“From—You’re giving me a letter from the _Empress_?!” he rasped out. Hearing the ripped, raw disbelief in his own voice, doing absolutely nothing to stop it. “She—What do you mean she knows? Knows _what_? What did you tell her?”

She knew he’d killed her mother. She’d known that as soon as it happened. The only thing Attano could have told her was that … that Attano had spared his life. That he wasn’t dead. That …

Would she send him an execution notice in a pretty gilded envelope? Would she send _Attano_ to give him an execution notice in a pretty gilded envelope? That was a lot of faith to put in the man. Not _unwarranted_ faith, but still …

Attano didn’t answer. Not that he ever did, really. Their entire first meeting had gone without a word from the man. Well, second meeting. Technically. Though the first hadn’t involved much talking either. Wordless roars of grief, mostly. He didn’t speak now either. The hand holding the envelope simply twitched slightly in Daud’s direction. Just the once. A silent, imperious instruction. 

Slowly, as though handling a viper, Daud bowed to inevitability, and took it.

The letter was written on thick, heavy paper. Good quality, almost cardstock. That was fortunate, because Daud could see several places where, even with that weight, the nib of the pen had almost torn through it, words dug into the paper in a childish, angry hand. It was written in pen, on Kaldwin paper. An attempt at official communication. The words were all those of a child, though. An angry, grieving, wounded child.

_Dear Mr. Daud,_

_I don’t know why I have to say that. Dear. You’re supposed to start letters like that, my tutors keep telling me, but you’re not. You’re not dear. I don’t like you. My tutors tell me that doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to be polite even when you don’t like someone. I don’t think I like that, either. _

_Corvo told me what you did. Not the first time. Not when you killed Mother. I already knew that. He told me you found him. After the Admiral poisoned him. He said you were the one that found him. He said you were sorry, and that you didn’t hurt him. So he didn’t hurt you. He didn’t kill you for what you did to Mother._

_<strike>I don’t</strike> <strike>You didn’t</strike> <strike>If you’d</strike>_

_I don’t want to thank you. I don’t like you. But you didn’t … They hurt him a lot. We trusted them, and then they hurt him, and you killed Mother and you **didn’t**, and I don’t know what to do with that. The Admiral told me Corvo was dead. He said they’d killed him. The Pendletons told me he was dead too. <strike>Everyone</strike> He gets hurt a lot. And you didn’t hurt him. You killed Mother and you didn’t hurt him, and I don’t know **why**._

_Corvo says you’re sorry, and that’s why. But nobody else was sorry. Why was it **you**?_

_I’m not going to hurt you. Or your men, because Corvo says that’s important to you. That’s why I’m writing. Corvo says he’ll get this to you, so you’ll know. You killed Mother, and I hate you, but I’m not going to hurt you. Because you didn’t hurt him. I don’t want to see you. I hope you go away and never come back. But I won’t … I won’t hurt you. _

_I hope that’s enough. I don’t think I can give you any more._

_Signed  
Empress Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin I_

_P.S. If Corvo doesn’t come back from giving you this, I’ll find every soldier left in the Empire and I will **make you sorry**._

… Daud read it. And then he read it again. And then he put the paper down, very slowly and carefully, on his desk. He rested his hand on it. His fingers were trembling badly. For once in his life, he made no attempt to hide it.

He looked up, eventually. At Attano. The Lord Protector. Still standing there, still gaunt and haggard and tired. Still calm. Unimpressed. Daud stared at him for the longest time.

“… Did you read this?” he asked finally. Hoarsely. “Did she show you? Did you read it?”

Attano eyed him carefully, but shook his head. “It was for you,” he said. “She told me not to peek. I promised.”

_Promised_. To a ten-year-old child writing a letter to an _assassin_. The assassin that killed her mother. But he promised, and Lord Corvo Attano’s word was clearly his _fucking bond_. Daud’s hand curled into a fist. He made sure it didn’t damage the paper.

“She says you told her I didn’t hurt you,” he said. Growled, really. Something strange, something hot and savage and _torn_ inside his chest. Angry. Savagely angry. That Attano had made it … made it sound like _that_ was the way around it had been. “I’m not sure what your policy on lying to your kid is, Attano, but—”

Attano Blinked in front of him. Nothing else. Nothing more than that, nothing more than a suddenly looming figure less than a few inches away, but Daud’s teeth clicked closed without his leave. The threat that had been absent the entire meeting thus far was suddenly _very much_ back in evidence. He was just a man, without the mask. But he was more than enough to kill someone.

“I. Do not. Lie to her.” he said. Harsh and clipped, in his soft, ruined voice. Less angry and more stating a solid, incontrovertible fact. This close, his brown eyes were like shards of bottle glass, hard and glittering. Daud stared at him, and nodded slowly.

Attano moved back. Physically, this time. Lightly, his shoulders settling down from their hard lines. Daud, who’d found himself half-pushed back onto his desk, eased his heels back onto the floor as well. The two Whalers who’d traversed in behind Attano looked at him, both of them half-lunged, both of them frozen. He shook his head slightly. They blinked away. Attano never so much as _flinched_. There was anger there. A hard, cold line of it. But he didn’t flinch.

“I told her the truth,” the man said now. Soft and careful. “I left some things out. But what I did tell her, I did not lie about. You didn’t hurt me.”

Daud stared at him. Remembering a half-dead man shackled partly upright in a transport cage. Remembering the brutal impact of Thomas’ fist against his cheekbone. Remembering how he’d slumped over his bound hands, sagging bonelessly and helplessly downwards to hang awkwardly across the metal edge. Unconscious. But he wasn’t hurt, he said. Daud didn’t hurt him.

Attano twitched slightly, under his stare. The first evidence of unease. He ducked his head slightly, so his hair swung forward in front of his face.

“I arrived here half-dead,” he finally offered, spreading his hands slightly in a vague shrug. “I arrived here poisoned and mostly dead, barely conscious and unable to move. You could have gutted me stem to stern and rolled me into the water for the hagfish. You could have cut my hand off, left me powerless, and tortured me to death. Or put a sword in the spare hand, if you wanted the pretence of a fight. You could have done a lot of things. You didn’t. A punch in the head and some time in a refinery tank don’t count, all things considered.”

Daud … stared at him some more. It wasn’t … He shouldn’t be so incredulous. He shouldn’t be so stunned and sick to his stomach. He’d heard worse. He’d _done_ worse. There wasn’t a thing there Attano wouldn’t have had reason to expect. But it … hurt something, to hear it laid out. To hear that at least some part of Attano _had_ expected it. 

And why not, he supposed. Even leaving aside his own reputation, his own _history_ … six months in Coldridge. A trip down the river poisoned half to death. It wasn’t like Attano didn’t have _experience_.

Enough that Empress Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin, first of her name, felt the need to write to an assassin to _thank him_ for not having brutally murdered her other parent out of hand. Because that was strange. Because in her entire experience thus far, that was _unique_.

Daud should have shoved six inches of steel through Hiram Burrows’ _fucking eye_.

Attano was looking at him still. Awkward, now. Trying to judge his expression. Daud wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Daud wasn’t sure if he _had one_. Attano shrugged again anyway. Spread his hands and smiled slightly. 

“It’s been a rough year,” he said, ruined-soft. “It’s possible my standards are low.”

It was possible—

Daud snorted. Thick and harsh and abrupt. It nearly choked out of him, and Attano startled slightly in place. A flinch. Just the tiniest one. Then he stared, bemused, when he realised Daud was laughing.

“It’s possible,” Daud repeated, shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s _possible_ your standards are low. Attano, no offense here, trust me, your standards are in the fucking _toilet_. And I’m speaking as a man who’s occasionally _lived_ in one.”

Attano blinked at him, for a long second. And then his lip twitched. Just slightly.

Daud looked away. Had to. The thread of levity hung between them, something light and almost genuinely easy, and it was too much. It was far too much. He looked down, at the letter still resting on his desk. At the blotched, gouged paper, at a child’s messy attempt at understanding impossible things. Horrible, cruel, impossible things. Why a man who’d murdered her mother could feel remorse. Why her father had been so badly treated that an assassin’s off-handed disinterest in killing and/or torturing him came off as _mercy_. Why any semblance of kindness was so rare that even that much of it had to be thanked for. She didn’t understand any of that, and honestly he didn’t either. He was standing there smiling with her father, a man whose life he couldn’t possibly have ruined any more thoroughly. A man who’d spared his life. He didn’t understand anything at all. He was starting to think he never had.

_Why was it **you**? Nobody else was sorry. Why was it **you**?_

Honestly, kid, fucked if he knew.

“… She’s worried for you,” he said, after a long minute. Softly. Almost soft enough to match the Lord Protector. Tracing his fingers gently over the paper. Taking care not to look at Attano. At the stillness in the centre of the room that had turned out not to be death. “She’s threatened me. If I hurt you. If you don’t come back. She’s afraid for you.”

Attano flinched. Ducked his head, his jaw set and hard. Daud watched from the corner of his eye. The man’s hands curled slowly and gently into fists.

“I don’t know how to help that,” he rasped tightly. “She knows … Havelock _told her_. What he’d done. I don’t know why, if he was trying to … to threaten her, or make her forgive him, or what. But she knows. He made her afraid of it. I don’t know how to fix it.”

Because that was the problem. The fact that Emily knew about it. Not the fact that he _had_ been tortured, been betrayed, been poisoned and left to die. None of that. Just that the Empress _knew_.

Void’s sake. The man was a damned fine Lord Protector, Daud was sure. He was a personal witness to that. But he was a _blithering idiot_ as a father.

“You could try not getting poisoned again,” he pointed out, and he honestly wasn’t being facetious. He probably sounded like it, but he wasn’t. “You’re one of the only things she has left. You toppled two separate conspiracies, nearly bloodlessly, to get her back. You survived poison and torture and damn near death to come back to her. You’re her father. Maybe not officially, but in every other way. You’re _important_ to her. If you want her to stay safe, if you want her to stay _sane_, you have to consider that. You have to weigh your own safety as well as hers.”

It wasn’t just two Whalers who traversed in at that one. It wasn’t just two of his men Daud could feel suddenly _staring_ at him. Heavy eyes behind thick lenses. He was aware of the irony. He was aware of how fucking rich it was for _him_, of all people, to say that.

But he owed her. This tiny Empress who hated him with every fibre of her being, with every justification in the world. Who’d put aside that hatred, just like her father, all unknowing. Because it was fair. Because he was sorry. Because he hadn’t hurt them any more. He owed her. He owed her anything he could give.

Even if it was just advice from a man who’d never followed it, to a man who never could.

Attano looked at him. Thin and gaunt and quivering where he stood. The ghost of Coldridge prison, who’d crawled his way out of the Void to mete justice as calmly and evenly as he could. Brown eyes like chips of bottle glass, and all his scars hidden by his coat.

“It will never matter more than her,” he whispered. His voice soft and ruined. Unyielding. In this one thing, never yielding. The Lord Protector to his last fucking breath, and never mind who broke because of it. “_Nothing_ matters more than her.”

Yeah. Daud got that. He really did. He just wasn’t sure how much it _helped_.

For _fuck’s sake_.

“… I’ll send you a contact,” he sighed, scraping his palms down his face. “We’re not staying in Dunwall. Aside from anything else, your Empress tells me she wants us gone. But I’ll send you a contact. If I hear anything, any threat to you or to her, I'll let you know. If _you_ need anything … Well. I figure I owe you at least one job.” He huffed slightly. “At least I’m pretty sure it won’t add that much to my sins, coming from you. We’ll get to that when we get to that. And for fuck’s sake, Attano. If you do nothing else, learn to _delegate_.”

It was Thomas who snorted at that. He was almost sure. Though it could have been any one of several others either. It hardly mattered. He shot a succinct sign in the right general direction, and looked at Attano instead. At the stiff, cautious man, eyes narrowed as he studied him, head tilted like a bird. He was frowning. Baffled, bewildered. Like he didn’t understand that at all.

The admonishment. Or the offer of help. Fucked if Daud knew either way, and fucked if he’d have understood any better in the other man’s shoes. Fucked if he _had_ understood any better. But at least he wasn’t the only one floundering in this …

Not relationship. That was _not_ the word here. He wasn’t sure there _was_ a word, for a man you’d torn to shreds, who got back up and didn’t kill you for it. He wasn’t sure that had happened often enough to have earned one. Mercy was in vanishingly short supply in the world. He was first hand witness to every possible variation of that. There wasn’t a word for Attano. He just _was_.

He was currently just staring at Daud. Wrongfooted start to finish. Daud looked away from him sharply. Looked down at his desk instead. Looked down at the letter, one last time.

“… I don’t think I should respond to this,” he said quietly. Smoothing it, carefully, in his hands, before folding it gently and putting it back in its envelope. “I don’t think she wants to hear from me. Not … Not in person. I wouldn’t ask her to. But if you could give her a message for me? If you … If you think it’s all right. If you think it would help her to listen to it?”

He looked at Attano then. Honestly, tiredly, the letter pressed close in his hand. The man looked back. Thin and thoughtful and merciful. He nodded, slowly. He inclined his head in acknowledgment.

Daud … didn’t know what to say, for a second. Couldn’t scrape together the words. But there was no point being fancy. The Empress, the little girl who’d written that letter, wouldn’t appreciate it any more than he would. Best just to be honest, he supposed.

“Tell her … Tell her I don’t know what to do with it either. Any of it. But I am sorry. And I will do everything in my power not to hurt either of you again. It’s not a lot for what she’s offered us, but it’s what I have, and I’ll give it gladly. If she ever needs anything from me, I’ll be there.”

Attano blinked carefully. An odd expression, something half between concern and apology. Daud didn’t understand it at first, until:

“What she’s offered you?” he asked softly, and the concern was all the Lord Protector, and the apology for it was … something else. Daud blinked at him, and felt … something soft, something incredibly dangerous, in his chest. 

He smiled. Crookedly. A stunned, exasperated crook of his lip.

“She’s just like you, you know,” he said, in lieu of explanation. “Bit angrier, maybe, a bit more clumsy about it, but she’s just like you. The spit of her father.” Attano opened his mouth, and Daud held up the letter to forestall him. “She doesn’t forgive me. This isn’t a pardon. But she won’t come for us. _Any_ of us. That’s what she’s offered. She’ll … put away her blade. Like her father. It’s … It’s more than enough.”

Mercy, in a world not made for it. Daud felt as much as heard the rest of his men, the surviving members of his … _family_ … stir around him. Mercy unlooked for. It was more than any of them would ever have thought to expect.

Even, he imagined, the black-eyed _bastard_ behind it all.

Attano’s expression changed again. At him, at _Emily_. A squall of something passed over him, something desperately lost, desperately grateful, desperately _proud_. Daud understood it, vaguely. At least that. At least that much. He smiled again, and reached out for the first time to pat the man gingerly on the shoulder.

“You did an okay job, Lord Protector,” he said gruffly. “I don’t know if it was on purpose or by accident, but somewhere along the line you did at least _something_ right.”

And there was, again, that strange, soft sense of levity, that sense of a world somehow gone accidentally right, against all the best efforts of everyone concerned, when the Lord Protector lifted Daud’s hand gently from his shoulder, smiled that odd little smile, and said wryly, with every seeming grace:

“Fuck you.”


End file.
